PHILADELPHIA, PA.- In fall 2026, the Barnes Foundation will resent Noguchi to Asawa: Designing Postwar America, a groundbreaking exhibition that reconsiders 20th-century art and design within the context of Japanese and Japanese American incarceration during World War II and the broader history of Asian America. This exhibition will be the first to explore how this tumultuous era of Japanese American history formed a foundation for modern art and design in the United States. Conceived and curated by Cindy Kang, curator at the Barnes, this exhibition is on view in the Roberts Gallery from September 20, 2026, through January 10, 2027.

Beauty and craftsmanship are hallmarks of midcentury Japanese American art and design. From Isamu Noguchi’s iconic furniture to Ruth Asawa’s inventive wire sculptures, Japanese American artists transformed the aesthetic landscape of postwar America. Yet beneath this artistry lies a shared history marked by forced relocation and incarceration during World War II. Confronting this difficult past, Noguchi to Asawa: Designing Postwar America offers a recontextualization of the work of influential 20th-century artists and designers through the lens of 1940s Japanese American incarceration.

“We are proud to present Noguchi to Asawa: Designing Postwar America, an exhibition celebrating the work of six renowned Japanese American artists and designers and their lasting impact on US culture,” says Thom Collins, Neubauer Family Executive Director and President of the Barnes. “This poignant exhibition is the third in our series of exhibitions and installations this year, all designed to offer a powerful exploration of the complex and multifaceted American experience.”

The exhibition chronologically and thematically juxtaposes sculpture and designs by two generations of artists affected by forced relocation and incarceration in the United States, including sculptor and designer Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988), architect and furniture designer George Nakashima (1905–1990), sculptor Leo Amino (b. Taiwan, 1911–1989), graphic designer S. Neil Fujita (b. Territory of Hawaii, 1921–2010), fiber artist and weaver Kay Sekimachi (b. 1926), and sculptor Ruth Asawa (1926–2013). The elder generation (Noguchi, Nakashima, and Amino) all established their practices before Japanese and Japanese Americans were sent to camps in February 1942, changing the direction of their careers. The younger generation (Fujita, Sekimachi, and Asawa) experienced their early artistic training in the camps through impromptu schools organized by incarcerated artists.





As these six artists reestablished their lives in the postwar era, they turned to creating domestic objects or small-scale works in dialogue with craft and design. Working during the precarious period of Japanese resettlement across the United States, these artists contended with emergent racial pressures and stereotypes that provide a relevant context for understanding their careers and artistic choices. The exhibition considers their work, materials, and techniques in the context of postwar Japanese American experiences, including racialization. By featuring objects that were part of midcentury American life—from coffee tables to album covers, chairs to wallpaper designs—the exhibition demonstrates that Asian American history is not separate from mainstream America but rather part of people’s daily lives through these objects in their homes.

“From Noguchi’s Akari light sculptures to Asawa’s suspended wire lobes, the contributions of mid-20th-century Japanese American artists helped define the look and feel of modern America,” says Cindy Kang. “The exhibition will examine the artists’ collective experiences and their understudied impact on American design.”

This exhibition includes sculpture, fiber art, furniture, and graphic design. Highlights include:

Isamu Noguchi, My Arizona(1943): Made after Noguchi returned to New York from the Poston camp in Arizona, this sculpture reflects on the artist’s seven months of incarceration. Although he entered the camp voluntarily in an attempt to improve the conditions there, once inside he became a prisoner like the rest of the Japanese Americans. Evoking a topographic view of the desert landscape, the stark white base features enigmatic concavities and protrusions, including a magenta square of plexiglass suspended above the upper left quadrant. The warm hue it casts onto the white support perhaps conveys how, as Noguchi described, “the hot sun shines interminably” in Arizona.
· George Nakashima, Milk House Coffee Table (1944): This object was one of the first significant pieces Nakashima created after he left the Minidoka incarceration camp and moved to New Hope, Pennsylvania. He set up a rudimentary workshop in the milk house on his employer’s farm and made the table from teak planks that his close friend, the artist Morris Graves, had kept for him in Washington state. This object—made from wood that was shipped from his home state across the country and named after the place where he began to re-establish himself—tangibly and poetically embodies Nakashima’s journey of displacement and resettlement in the postwar period.
Ruth Asawa, Untitled(S.272, Hanging Seven-Lobed Continuous Interlocking Form with Spheres in the First and Sixth Lobes) (c. 1954): Asawa’s signature multi-lobed wire sculptures, like this virtuosic example, are embedded not only within the lineage of the Bauhaus and Euro-American modernism but also within Asian American history. Scholars have connected Asawa’s choice of wire as a medium and her painstaking process of looping and coiling to both her experience incarcerated behind barbed wire and broader histories of Asian labor in the United States. Her family was part of a wave of Japanese immigrants who came in the early 20th century to work on farms, and Asawa grew up doing the repetitive, cyclical chores of agricultural labor. The roots of Asawa’s innovative suspended sculptures thus extend beyond her education at Black Mountain College.
S. Neil Fujita, Album cover design for the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s Time Out (Columbia Records) (1959): As art director at Columbia Records, Fujita defined the look of jazz in America in the 1950s with his abstract album covers that drew from the work of modern European artists along with personal influences. One of the covers he was most proud of was Dave Brubeck’s Time Out. The quartet had just returned from a tour of Asia and, as Fujita recounted, “I had recently returned from the service with armed forces intelligence in the Western Pacific and I had been through East Asia, the Philippines, and Calcutta, so I borrowed some colors and shapes that seemed to go with the mood.”
Kay Sekimachi, Kunoyuki (c. 1968): To weave Kunoyuki, Sekimachi used undyed, clear monofilament, a nylon product manufactured by DuPont. Experimenting with industrial materials unencumbered by art historical or cultural associations provided her a sense of artistic freedom. Sekimachi was particularly interested in exploring the effects of transparency in these diaphanous hangings. A ghostly form that sways and turns with air currents, Kunoyukiis a human-sized object that the viewer can both encounter as a bodily presence and see through completely. This duality of visibility and invisibility resonated with the racial consciousness of a fomenting Asian American movement in the late 1960s.

Leo Amino, Refractional #47(1969): Refractional #47 consists of five separate small objects. Their intimate scale invites the viewer to hold them in their hands and manipulate them to see the way light passes through the various layers of color. Working out of his home studio, Amino eschewed the monumentality of many of his contemporaries’ work, instead revaluing the minor and the modest as part of an intentional artistic position. His innovative use of plastics places his work in dialogue with science and industry, and particularly within the history of plastics developed by the US military during World War II.